Friday's Post

Oooops, I ran out of time to post on Friday, and Saturday, so here's what happened, but posted on Sunday.

So, Nancy and I went for a run in the morning, and to the morning market to pick up some dan bing (egg crepe) for breakfast.

I don't remember how teaching went and I'm too lazy to look up what my lessons were so let's just pretend that they went spectacularly. Oh wait, I do remember my middle class because I taught about bike safety. I brought my bicycle in and set it on a towel in the classroom. Yep, I had all the kids attention that class. Go props (which is what the Chinese teachers were telling me, but seriously, I can't lug in bikes all the time).

For lunch we had apple curry again. I think that's my favorite school lunch so far, although it's all been good. After eating, Nancy and I went to a cake place that is closes at 6pm, so we can't usually get anything there. We have limited ourselves to only having desserts on Saturday and so we needed to pick these up so we could eat them on the train to Taipei. Oh, but "them" I mean mini cheese cakes and mini brownies. The afternoon market isn't actually an afternoon market. I was planning on picking stuff up for Sunday dinner at the market as long as we were right there, but it wasn't open yet. I guess that it is a night market, but one that doesn't stay open too long.

Because the market wasn't open I couldn't buy a fresh chicken, but I'm pretty sure Nancy was okay with that. So, we rode to the grocery store to pick up orange soda, chicken, and broccoli. We went back home to put the stuff in the fridge and then headed out to find a quick adventure. We decided to go walk a trail by the river near the Martyr's Shrine (pictures of this are on the previous blog). We didn't end up having too much time to explore, but that was okay, because the trail wasn't very long.

My afternoon class involved having the kids act out a Chinese tale. I knew it would be difficult to do, but I had no idea. I had all the kids involved, so that was good because I didn't have kids sitting there bored, but I had some actors and some sound crew, and it was super hard. But I'm pretty good at BS-ing old Chinese Tales. Class was shortened by 10 minutes and even if it was the whole time, I wouldn't have been able to finish it, so since I was the narrator, I just totally changed the story and made it end when it was just supposed to be getting good. I hope none of the kids run across this story later in life, or they'll know that I was way off.

The reason class ended early was because we had a birthday party for Matthew (he's the five year old boy that I tutor- well, now he's six). He had a giant cake with Thomas the Tank Engine on it. Mmmm. The cake was so good (you know what I said about only eating dessert on Saturdays? It's also on special occasions). It did have a layer of that weird pudding, but it didn't have the layer of taro, so it was mostly regular (not honey cake) cake with whip cream frosting.

Then I tutored the two preschoolers, and the one elementary school kids until 7pm. At 7 I decided to ride around everywhere to go and take pictures because everyone is hasteling me. Hey, aren't my stories better then pictures? I guess not. But, because it is dark at 7pm, the pictures didn't turn out so well. But I did try, and I did go to a bunch of places, I just couldn't get pictures of most of them.

After a tiny dinner and after riding around I came back to wait for Nancy to get home because we were going to go get juice. (Ronald- the owner of the juice stand- had Wednesday and Thursday off and so we decided to go and say hi and get some juice when he came back on Friday.) We got there around 10pm and stayed until 2am. Yeah. We talked a lot. We were planning on getting juice and then going bowling, but while we were getting juice it started raining pretty hard and we didn't want to leave the tent. Once it stopped raining we remembered that our socks (we took socks to go bowling) were in the basket of our bikes. We went to go check on them. Yep, they were most definitely soaked. Well, by that time it was 11 something and we didn't want to have to go back to the house to grab more socks before heading out to go bowling, and we were worried that it would rain again and we weren't sure if the bowling alley would actually be open and we didn't want to show up soaked and bowl, or show up soaked and have it be closed. So we decided to stay and chat it up with our friend and his brother. This guy showed up to the fruit stand and was hanging around. Ronald said it was his brother, but I'm not sure about that one. Anyway, we were wondering why this guy was hanging around and we finally found out that he was a fireman and it was his day off, so he had nothing better to do, plus when he saw Nancy and I there ("two beautiful girls") he wanted to stay and try to talk to us. I didn't have a huge problem with staying there and talking because I knew if we went home Nancy and I would stay up late talking so we might as well talk in a place that's not our rooms and where we can talk to more people then just us. But, at 1am I finally said we had to go. We had to get on a train at 6:15 am the next day to go to Taipei and it takes 15 minutes to ride there so we were going to have to get up early. We told the guys we had to go, and they said bye, but then Ronald starts ranting about how he doesn't understand why more Americans don't come to his juice stand and why they all go to the other one. He ranted for an hour and so we didn't leave until 2am. I was not too happy with that one, but it was kind of funny to see how well Ronald can hold a grudge.

But that's why I didn't have time to blog on Friday. I got home after 2am and had to get up at 5am.